BANGALORE, INDIA: COBOL is considered as the language of the past by some. COBOLlooked upon as a dinosaur by others. COBOLconsidered not updated by the rest. But the question remains. Is this really so? This year as COBOL turns fifty; we look back at the years gone by and see how, contrary to popular belief, the language known as the language of the past has actually grown to become the language of the present and that of the future. Over the years, it has grown and matured, keeping pace with new programming trends and today is even available on the cloud.

A very good example is that of Om Logisticsa logistics support and solutions company with its very own COBOL based home grown ERP application. Its scattered network was creating problems for the company, posing hindrances to information flow, thereby affecting the growth of the company.

But with COBOL based application, deployed on Linux, they were able to take care of their problems which resulted in substantial improvement in their bottom line. Like Om Logistics, there are many other companies that rely on COBOL for smooth functioning of their mission critical business applications. This is one language that has stood the test of time and has emerged forever victorious!

COBOL, once a favorite of the Y2K era, came into being on May 28, 1959, at a meeting of the Short Range Committee at the Pentagon. It has come a long way since. As we celebrate its 50th birthday, we realized what a difference it has made to our daily lives and to the worlds businesses at large.

According to a study, there are 200 times as many COBOL transactions as there are Google searches made in a day. We come in touch with COBOL each time we talk on our cell phones, use the ATM and credit cards, or while travelling by train or flights. It is one programming language that has never failed to keep pace and is ubiquitously present in our everyday life.

According to industry estimates, some 60-80% of the worlds enterprises rely on COBOL for their mission-critical business applications. The language supports over 30 bn transactions each day with over 200 bn lines of code. It is a well known fact that COBOL is one of the safest programming languages in the world, currently in operation globally across every industry. It is one of the oldest and most trusted languages and with its tendency to program from the core, it is extremely difficult to hack into. It is one language that is very much in demand even by the legacy systems and its popularity never seems to wane.

For a long time, there were a lot of myths associated with the language but with time developers and businesses alike have started seeing through the fable. Like verbosity, perceived at one point to be a drawback of the language, is in fact one of its biggest strengths. It makes the language easy to learn and easy to understand and code.

Many years down the line, the code can still be revisited and understood with ease. The language though originally meant for mainframe developers, has today come a long way and is also available on Windows, Unix and Linux platforms. It touches everything from personal computers to connected applications and can be used to host applications on the cloud with ease.

There are various agencies that help testify the actual worth of COBOL in the industry today. According to Ovum, there are some $2 tn worth of mainframe applications in corporations that house approximately 70% of all critical business logic and data. Forrester states that the COBOL code running core business applications will exceed 200 bn in the next one decade.

In todays industry scenario, companies are looking to cut IT costs, and modernization of COBOL applications is a better and preferred option rather than rewriting. The industry has also seen a remarkable rise in the demand for COBOL developers. Many business leaders are concerned that their COBOL programmers will retire in the next five to ten years, and it will be very difficult to find developers with the right skill sets. Fortunately, there are around 10,000 new COBOL programmers being industry-trained each year, and hopefully it will help to bridge-in the gap. The good news is that in India itself, it is estimated that there are approximately 50,000 COBOL programmers working on various projects helping fulfil the worldwide demand of COBOL programmers.

Time will pass and businesses will advance but the need will always remain the same to grow in size while reducing costs. It is this need that will continue to be fuelled by one of the oldest, most popular languages which was considered dead but has now risen to show the world that it is very much alive and revitalized. COBOL has not only kept pace with the current applications but has also been able to meet the business demands, thereby proving why it has always been the most popular coding language and how it has remained alive and kicking.

Ashish Masand, The author is country manager, Micro Focus India